Hey everyone Rich here today I'm dropping a new video with a Junkpunk developer update. Today ill be going over the some of the things we've been working on most importantly ill be discussing a new tech that we have designed which allows us to grow foliage in real time across the entire world and a new UI rework. This will of course all come on top of all the content already coming in the next monolith update.
I'm going to drop a video link below for you all to check it out. I am super aware we have pushed back on the release date of Monolith 3.
There is a few good reasons for this and I'm hoping that within the next few weeks I can get a solid update date for Monolith 3 to be finally wrapped and pushed out.
For those of you who don't want to watch the video. Or want to read more;
1. We have some really exciting news that we will be releasing in due course about our studio. We cant say what it is just yet but it's really great.
2. I have been re-doing all the UX/UI graphics, and inadequacies so when we push the next update the new UI should be great and playing the game overall should be easier to understand and more fun for people to play.
3. This is the longest one. We have designed new tech which allows us to grow foliage in real time across the entire map without needing to recompile anything. This means we can change the landscape at runtime. Something that we had no way of doing in the engine. So this has added weeks of time to the development. Unfortunately it's just one of those unforeseen technical hurdles that we had to get over as a studio. What this means however is that we can whenever we want, proceduraly generate worlds that change without needing to load or compile. This has been a major breakthrough and it has come with a tonne of technical leaps we have had to get over.
To put this in perspective. Some of you might have played games where you place say, a garden or a "farm" where things will grow in that space. That is fine easily doable. However our new system will allow us to change an entire map in real time, taking into account the exact textures that should have certain things on them. In the video I will show the latest demo version. It's very simple it just generates grass at runtime and we can turn that on and off as we wish. But we are really proud of it and it opens the technical doors to tonnes of stuff.
When we planned out the monoliths we thought we could leverage the foliage system inside the engine to get everything we need and make it happen when we fired monolith 3. However that was not the case as you need to hand place / design and implement all the foliage and plants before you compile the game. This is perfectly fine for a game say Kingdom Come Deliverance where nothing changes you can compile the map/maps and when events fire you have a way of pausing the player and they can "sleep" ( load all the new stuff in a loading screen ).
We needed to have monolith 3 changing the entire world at runtime with no loading screen. So we needed to work out a way to generate that on the fly with a press of a button without a loading screen. It's been quite a massive challenge and one that we underestimated. However we thing that's probably the biggest challenge of the development.
So yeah unfortunately it has blown the update time frame to pieces but we have made something really, really cool and I promise it will be worth the wait.
Thanks everyone and have a good weekend.
Rich and SCT.